Tuesday, June 14, 2011

baby-steppin ...

My mom's doctor insisted last week that I get her back x-rayed again. She didn't even look at the first set of x-rays we did at the urgent care, "I don't know how to read those." So we did, and we haven't heard from her since. I brought the first set of x-rays with us to the diagnostic center the doc favors and asked if they could compare both sets of x-rays. No problem. So now the doc will have to at least read a radiologists's report about the first set as well. I don't think that we're going to hear that anything major has happened to her back as she has osteoporosis which I suspect is at the root of all of this pain, but I'm not sure and I want to know. Wouldn't you?

I guess my greatest fear, besides my mom having some sort of fracture, is that her doctor doesn't really want to treat her, to deal with her, but prefers to pass her off to some other specialist. Medicine today is all about specialists. She has hinted as much, mentioning that maybe she should see a back specialist. Maybe she should. But will a back doctor do anything more than what we are already doing with her regular doc — managing her back pain until she heals? She is getting a little better, gradually, each day. She feels better by the end of the day, after she has been moving around and has had pain medication. I'm no doctor and I don't want to overlook anything that might help speed her recovery, but I also don't want to add to her stress level, and a new, unfamiliar doctor would do that. Sigh.

I'm hoping that she can at least get more mobile again before I have to go back to dealing with her dementia/long term issues. Her world is already shrinking incrementally. It's strange how the body responds to trauma. When her back issues first happened I felt like she vaguer than usual, but now that we've been dealing with her back hurting for almost two weeks the memory issues seem to have taken a back seat. It's as if the body can only deal with one crisis at a time. I'm pretty sure that lying in bed or sitting all day is not the way to speed recovery, but I don't want to push her too hard, either. One day at a time ...

I feel like Bill Murray in What About Bob? "Baby steps onto the elevator, baby steps walking down the hall." I'm baby-steppin ...

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